Publishing Perspectives has a profile of Patricia Arancibia, the Manager of International Content at Barnes & Noble’s Digital Group, in which she talks about how e-books make it easier to bring international content, most notably books in foreign languages, to the US.
“We always had a timing problem,” says Arancibia, “because someone has to print more books, put them on a ship, and bring them to America, they have to be in customs and then they have to enter the territory, get into trucks and go all across the country. Now with e-books we don’t have that challenge anymore.”
The article talks about how Arancibia’s mission is to find books in any language customers might find interesting and bring them to America.
“One of the things is bringing content from all over the world — from small, medium and large publishers — that was never before on sale or available in the US,” Arancibia explains. “The other is, because I deal with all international, I also deal with any kind of corporation, organization and government abroad that are related somehow to publishing, and with whom it’s important for us to be in contact when we deal with foreign publishing industries.” This mission gives Arancibia a unique perspective on how the digital transition is progressing across the globe. “In general I would say particularly Germany and the UK are way ahead,” she tells us. “Japan and China are clearly doing a lot, and other European countries and Latin America, the Spanish-speaking world…it’s interesting, because it started this year and it’s already moving fast. This year in March in Brazil, there was the first ever digital-book summit in the Americas, and it was very very interesting.”
It’s a fascinating article from the perspective of foreign-language e-books, and sort of complements Mike Shatzkin’s post about the prospects for American English-language books in Europe. (Shatzkin points out that a big problem for e-books is the relative lack of availability of non-English e-book titles, something that Arancibia seems to be working on remedying at least for the US.)
But on the other hand, it’s a little jarring to find no discussion of the issue of territorial rights. I’m sure that non-English-language book contracts have territorial rights written into them, too. How does B&N deal with the matter if the publisher in Japan or Argentina or wherever does not hold the rights for sale to the rest of the world?
Indeed a fascinating look at how e-books are making foreign language books available internationally BUT, as you rightly point out, no discussion re territorial rights.
Even for English language e-books this is a hot topic as leading publishers have stopped WH Smith and Waterstones in UK from selling e-books to anyone other than residents of UK. This is in breach of most contracts which, as I understand it, grant regional rights to english language books, e.g USA, UK and Europe, Australia etc. In my view, singling out one market for one product is as close to illegal as you can get and it adversely affects all authors who wish to sell their e-books outside of the UK (in accordance with their contracts).
It is actually easy in the UK for retailers to know what territorial rights are attached to a book via Nielsens Book Data and/or the distributors but its seems publishers are reluctant to make this information available for e-books. My default position would be assume the territorial rights for an e-book are the same as those for a physical book unless the publisher advises otherwise.